BigCommerce was founded in 2009 by Eddie Machaalani and Mitchell Harper in Sydney, Australia, before relocating its headquarters to Austin, Texas. The platform positions itself as a SaaS alternative to self-hosted solutions like Magento, aimed at growing businesses that need more built-in features than basic platforms provide.
The company went public on Nasdaq in August 2020, raising $152 million in its IPO. BigCommerce serves merchants in over 150 countries and processes billions of dollars in annual gross merchandise value. Notable customers include Ben & Jerry’s, Skullcandy, and Woolrich.
BigCommerce differentiates itself with a strong set of built-in features that don’t require additional apps or plugins. Multi-channel selling across Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Instagram, and Google Shopping is included out of the box. The platform also supports multiple currencies, languages, and storefronts from a single dashboard.
The company has bet heavily on headless commerce, offering APIs and integrations that let merchants use BigCommerce as a backend while building custom frontends with frameworks like Next.js or Gatsby. Partnerships with content management systems like WordPress and Contentful extend this approach.
BigCommerce employs over 1,500 people across offices in Austin, San Francisco, Sydney, and London. Annual revenue reached approximately $300 million in recent years. While it’s smaller than Shopify, BigCommerce competes aggressively on enterprise features, B2B commerce capabilities, and lower total cost of ownership for merchants who’d otherwise pay heavily for Shopify Plus.
